The last incarnation of my site came about roughly 4 years ago, and I would like to change it up again. My problem is that I have done absolutely no research into the advances in web design or programming since, and even then I got around my problems largely by purchasing a license for Article Manager. Work being what it is, I have gaps of time when absolutely nothing is going on or I am too busy to do anything else, and AM was able to streamline my upload process - plus it was pretty cheap.
The problem I ran into early on is that AM is meant more for newspaper-style sites - brief write ups and extended text-heavy articles, with few images, cross links, and no options to imbed video. This website (
http://www.speedarena.com/index.html) uses AM, to give an example, and has been heavily modified; I know it's been heavily modified because it took a few months for the Interactive Tools' people to help get the system working for me.
Since it's been so long, I was wondering if there are easier ways to do this now. Whether it costs a little or is free, as long as it's secure and streamlined. I have a lot of fields entered that I would like to cross link - score, publisher, developer - but not sure how, or if I could even do that with a new setup. Then there is design - I haven't designed anything in years, and everything I did before was as basic as humanly possible to keep updating quick and because I have next to no experience with image editing. I was surprised last time to find that CSS dominated design.
I think a few people do this for a living, so what kind of costs and options are there these days? Are those template sites, with designs from anywhere from $50 to a few hundred, any good? Content management systems improved much?
